Saturday, January 13, 2018

Vigil has been selected to screen as part of Art 3's Second Biannual Cube Art Project. The video will be presented as a 750 sq. foot digital public display (with sound) in Lincoln, NE. Opens January 19th with screenings throughout the year.

Vigil features a nameless woman in a black dress slowly crossing an undefined, stark landscape. Extending from her costume, a trail of cloth symbolic of her mourning blows in the wind as the woman moves through a time and space with no beginning or end. Her meditative stillness combines with electronic sound to create an otherworldly visual intensity.

Sunday, October 8, 2017

Quatre (Mallarmé) by Chris BeckerQuatre (Mallarmé) began as a movement of my musique concrète-inspired suite Portraits-Souvenir, a work-in-progress inspired by the French avant-garde and more obliquely various friends of mine in the arts. The original version of Quatre was built out of a field recording I made of toads and insects noisily croaking and chattering away after a Houston rainstorm. I edited and heavily processed the recording using tools in Ableton Live, my go-to digital audio workstation. Soprano, composer, and visual artist Misha Penton offered to improvise a vocal over the track, and chose for the text an excerpt from a poem by French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whose words aligned nicely with the various subtexts of the suite. Not only did Misha record two different, wildly dramatic vocal performances, she also recorded herself reciting Mallarmé’s words in French. Other sounds became a part of the piece, including the ticking and chiming of my great grand mother’s antique clock, the furious pecking of typewriter keys, and an abrupt burst of drunken laughter.So the process was first composition, then improvisation over the composition, and finally composition of the improvisation to create a new composition, or something like that. To my ears, the timing of the sounds, singing and spoken words is both poetic and filmic, and could not have been realized in any way other than the trustful back and forth I enjoyed with Misha.

credits

released October 8, 2017

Quatre (Mallarmé) Composed by Chris Becker and Misha PentonText by Stéphane Mallarmé from Le Phenomene Futur (A Phenomenon of the Future), 1875English translation by Misha PentonVocals performed and recorded by Misha PentonAll other sounds recorded by Chris BeckerMixed by Chris BeckerMastered by Douglas Henderson

I am also thrilled to have WIDOW | GHOSTS and WW screening with Experience Films at the 2017 Fayetteville International Film Festival. Original score for both films: Chris Becker and Cinematography: Valerie Barnes. Come see them at Stage Eighteen​ Sept 13th, 7-9 p.m. Visit Experiencefilms.net for more event details

Saturday, August 26, 2017

On August 19, New York-based Racoco Productions presented an outdoor performance of Recidivistas, choreography by Rachel Cohen and music by Chris Becker. Racoco's longtime collaborator Chris Becker composed the music when the piece was presented as trio for chashama's Oasis Festival in 2006.